What
did you set out to do when you began translating the Reliance of the Traveller?

I
began translating Reliance of the Traveller in
Jordan, out of personal need for a shari'a manual, to know and practice Islam
in my own life. Making it available to others was an afterthought that came
to me after I had set out to produce a work in which I could look up the
questions that I needed to know without having to memorize it all.

I had moved
to Jordan in 1980, and lived near Amman in Suwaylih, with many students
and teachers of the University of Jordan's shari'a college. That
first year, I heard a lot of well-meaning religious advice that one might
have preferred to know rather than be told, a perhaps not unfamiliar feeling
to many new Muslims. During this period I began to translate the meanings
of the Qur'an using other English translations, and then read through
the Muhammad Muhsin Khan's interpretation of Sahih al-Bukhari, trying
to record every Islamic ruling I could find in the hadith. In the end,
I realized that there was a tremendous number of questions in my life
that I did not have Islamic answers for.

At the end
of summer 1981 I moved to Huwwara, a village in the north of Jordan, both
to improve my spoken Arabic and to work on a master's degree in educational
psychology while teaching English at the University of Yarmouk, in nearby
Irbid. The move to the north led to my meeting people who knew traditional
Islamic ulama in Damascus, among them, Sheikh 'Abd al-Wakil al-Durubi,
who I made the acquaintance of in his bookshop off the courtyard of the
Darwishiyya mosque, where he was imam.

In Sheikh
'Abd al-Wakil, I felt I had found someone who really knew Islam, and he
was the one who eventually inspired me to try to translate a fiqh manual.
I had been a commercial fisherman in the North Pacific for seven seasons,
and I remembered a book the captain used to keep in the wheelhouse near
the charts, a book of bearings, with the precise compass directions between
one point of land and another in Alaskan waters. This was the sort of
work I hoped to produce in shari'a, a book that I could open up
and find accurate, substantive ethical knowledge to apply in my life.

Sheikh 'Abd
al-Wakil had such knowledge, and I came to produce a book that would try
to represent his kind of traditional learning. In the following eleven
years of my association with him, I never asked him a question that he
didn't know the answer to, and I never asked him why he said so except
that he would produce a text for it from a recognized shari'a work.
It was something I had not been aware of before. When one meets a universsity
professor of shari'a, one gets the impression of a senior student
who is but more widely read than the students he teaches; but when one
meets a traditional alim, one gets the impression of someone who knows
the actual content of the shari'a by having learned and memorized,
in a word, someone with 'ilm or "knowledge."

A second
difference was one of attitude. Traditional sheikhs like Sheikh 'Abd al-Wakil
impressed me deeply as Muslims, men whose concept of spirituality was
to learn the divine command, hold it absolutely sacred, and to do their
utmost to live it, outwardly and inwardly. They had apparently taken this
attitude from the living example of their own teachers, and so on, back
to earliest times. For example, Sheikh 'Abd al-Wakil was a genuinely humble
man, not out of ignorance of his level of learning (which was arguably
above that of a mufti), but rather because Allah had ordered him to be
humble.

I once made
a remark to him about someone who gave one of the notoriously lax fatwas
of the present century, saying that one had to respect his opinion, since
he was an alim. "An alim?" he said, looking incredulous. "The first thing
an alim knows is
that the next world is more important than this one." He was totally what
he taught in this respect, and his approach of 'amal bi 'ilm, "living
what one knows" was also something I later sought to preserve in my translation.

In autumn
of 1982, I took the Shafi'i fiqh manual Kifayat al-akhyar
(The sufficiency of the good) to Sheikh 'Abd al-Wakil and asked him what
he thought of translating it. He said that it often mentioned several
positions on an issue without telling which was the most reliable for
fatwa. He suggested instead a copy of `Umdat al-salik (Reliance
of the Traveller), and I bought it from him. Working through the translation,
the knowledge-based shari'a approach captured my imagination, and
I was to add several appendices on questions not treated in the text,
including biographies of all the scholars mentioned, not only to help
Muslims know their scholars, but also to clarify, by actual examples,
the difference between the present level of Islamic scholarship and the
past.